Bitwise CIO Says Investors Are Asking the Wrong Question About Bitcoin's Bottom
Matt Hougan argues the cycle-bottom debate misses the point as Galaxy, Standard Chartered, and NYDIG publish forecasts that agree on a coming bull cycle but diverge sharply on where the price bottom lies and when it will arrive.
Bitwise Asset Management chief investment officer Matt Hougan pushed back this week on the growing institutional debate over where Bitcoin will bottom, telling investors that fixating on a price floor is a distraction from the more durable forces reshaping demand for the asset.
His comments arrived as three of the most-cited research desks in crypto, Galaxy Digital, Standard Chartered, and NYDIG, published forecasts that share a bullish directional outlook but disagree significantly on the projected bottom price range and timing.
Bitcoin was trading near $66,797 on June 15, down roughly 47% from its all-time high of $126,080 set in October 2025. The drawdown mirrors the percentage loss seen in the 2021 to 2022 cycle, though the dollar decline is considerably larger in absolute terms.
The Federal Reserve has held its benchmark rate in the 3.50% to 3.75% range through mid-2026, adding opportunity-cost pressure to a non-yielding asset already contending with weakened sentiment.
Three desks, three answers
The disagreement among institutional analysts is unusually wide on the question of where prices will trough. Galaxy Digital places the cycle bottom between $40,000 and $46,000, a projection built on historical drawdown patterns, on-chain cost-basis modeling, and halving-cycle timing analysis, with that low expected before the end of Q4 2026.
Standard Chartered's Geoffrey Kendrick took the opposite view in a June 12 client note, declaring that Bitcoin already bottomed at $59,000 and projecting a recovery to $100,000 by year-end. That call marks a significant revision from Standard Chartered's own February 2026 position, when a Global Research report projected Bitcoin would slide to $50,000 before recovering. Within four months, the bank had raised its projected bottom by $9,000 and moved its call to suggest the trough had already passed.
NYDIG occupies an in-between position, acknowledging that price stability in the mid-$60,000 range could represent a "potential early bottoming phase" but warning that the market has not structurally ruled out a deeper move lower.
NYDIG attributed the current weakness to a cluster of forces rather than a single trigger, including momentum flowing into artificial intelligence investments, capital diverted by the SpaceX IPO, concerns about quantum computing vulnerabilities in cryptography, and selling activity linked to Iranian sanctions and Strategy's (formerly MicroStrategy) Bitcoin sales.
Why Hougan says investors are asking the wrong question
Hougan's argument is not that the bottom doesn't matter, but that investors with a multi-year time horizon are not well-served by trying to pinpoint it. He has pointed repeatedly to the behavior of institutional ETF holders as evidence that structural demand has changed the character of this cycle. Spot Bitcoin ETFs pulled in roughly $60 billion in net inflows between January 2024 and October 2025. During a subsequent drawdown of more than 50%, total outflows from those products came in below $10 billion.
"In other words, despite a punishing bear market, professional investors have proven to be 'diamond hands' in bitcoin," Hougan said in commentary published by CoinDesk in March 2026.
His longer-term price outlook spans multiple timeframes. He has forecast a $200,000 Bitcoin price as a 2026 cycle target and 28% compound annual returns over the following decade (against his estimates of roughly 5% for equities and 4% for bonds). Looking further out, he has projected a price of $1 million per coin and, over a 20-year horizon, $6.5 million per coin.
He has publicly acknowledged those figures sound extreme while arguing the underlying adoption math supports them. "The wildest thing about my $1 million prediction," he wrote in January 2026 CoinDesk commentary, "is that it's not wild at all."
On-chain signals
Technical and on-chain data largely support the view that Bitcoin is in a late-cycle accumulation zone rather than in freefall. The MVRV Z-Score, a metric comparing market value to the aggregate cost basis of all coins, sits at approximately 0.41, a level historically associated with bottoming periods.
The monthly Relative Strength Index (RSI, a momentum indicator running from 0 to 100) is at 35.12, and the daily RSI is at 25.75, both deeply in oversold territory. The Rainbow Chart, a logarithmic regression tool, has classified Bitcoin's current price zone as "fire sale" territory, and the 200-week moving average has come under test, two additional signals that have historically coincided with cycle lows.
CryptoQuant analysts have flagged approximately $53,600 as a critical support level tied to the realized price of short-term holders, meaning that price roughly represents the average acquisition cost for recently active market participants.
Regional stakes
The bottom debate plays out differently in markets where Bitcoin is a transactional tool rather than a speculative asset. In Nigeria, where roughly 47% of adults hold crypto and monthly peer-to-peer trading volumes exceed $2.4 billion, cycle drawdowns influence real economic decisions around remittances and currency hedging against naira depreciation.
Kenya's monthly on-chain volumes exceed $900 million, and the country recently entered the top 20 of Chainalysis's global adoption rankings.
Sub-Saharan Africa recorded $205 billion in on-chain value between July 2024 and June 2025, a 52% year-on-year increase that spans the period of Bitcoin's descent from its peak.
The data largely supports Hougan's framing: structural usage held firm while price fell.
In South Asia, India's estimated 127 million crypto users and Pakistan's growing remittance corridor via Binance P2P face a more direct impact. Pakistan's crypto market, recently legalised after a period of prohibition, saw its Binance P2P remittance corridor expand 18.7% through 2025 to 2026, a figure that carries added weight given how recently the market gained legal standing. A prolonged bear market may compress the economic value of crypto remittances and tend to dampen retail participation in markets where entry timing is more sensitive to price levels.
What comes next
Whether Standard Chartered's $59,000 call or Galaxy's $40,000 scenario proves correct will likely shape regulatory momentum in emerging markets through the second half of 2026, according to analysis from CryptoNewsNavigator and the Ripple Africa Regulatory Outlook for 2026.
A sustained recovery toward $100,000 would put pressure on regulators in India and Nigeria to formalize frameworks faster. A drop toward $46,000 could slow that process considerably. India's taxation policy has remained sensitive to market conditions, and Nigeria's Securities and Exchange Commission has been incrementally formalizing its framework, meaning neither regulatory environment will respond to price movements in a purely linear fashion.
For long-term holders following Hougan's logic, neither outcome changes the thesis. For crypto users in many of the world's fastest-growing markets, who are transacting rather than investing, the price level in Q3 2026 will matter quite a bit more.